Review

Unreal is a very good first person shooter. Frankly, I don't have anything overtly negative to say about it. Lest you assert that the lack of enthusiasm in that opening statement is due to the fact that I'm spoiled by the 'improvements' made to the genre since 1998, let me state for the record that the last shooter I played in its entirety was System Shock 2. Furthermore, I haven't spent any significant amount of time with a single-player shooter since System Shock 2. Still, if you want to assert that my lack of enthusiasm for Unreal is due to the impression made upon me by System Shock 2, go right ahead, I won't deny it.

But it's probably more valuable for me to expound my luke warm response than to rationalize it. It's not that I didn't like Unreal. As I said, it's a very good first person shooter. I say that with the same intent I have when I say that Nox is a very good action RPG. The statement is both true, and intended to impress upon you the fact that all of the failings of the genre are intact in the particular specimen. Unreal is a classic first person shooter. I would hold it up as one of the premiere examples of the 'traditional' shooter.  Unreal embodies what is now a well established recipe. This recipe was the staple of shooters for quite awhile, from its inception in, oh, 1991, up even to this day. Maybe it's worth taking a moment to trace the overall geneology of first person shooters. The main trunk starts with Wolfenstein 3D and runs a fairly straight path to the near-present, with the likes of Red Faction and Serious Sam (I/II). That main trunk runs right smack through Unreal. In addition, the trunk has produced several legitimate splinter genres. Games such as Thief 1/2, System Shock 2, and No One Lives Forever explored the notion that maybe you don't have to shoot everything. Tribes 1/2 decided that maybe you need vehicles and explicit team roles and that the whole point is to get online. UT and Quake 3 in turn splintered off the Tribes branch, back in the direction of the main trunk, embracing multiplayer but eschewing the vehicles and team roles. At some point, someone decided that reality had its own appeal and so we have the branch with the likes of Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Operation Flashpoint, etc.. Note, for the record, I don't classify Half-Life as the panacea to the genre that it is widely acclaimed to be. SS2 is a better game than Half-Life. Frankly, I think Unreal is a better game than Half-Life. Maybe I should just end the review on that. Unreal is a better game than Half-Life. My best evidence for that statement is that I finished Unreal. Not only that, but I felt perfectly inclined to jump right into the Mission Pack (literally - about 2 minutes after finishing Unreal). This is in marked contrast to the cruel hoax that was the last five episodes of Half-Life, which left me wondering why the hell I play video games.

All of this categorization means exactly squat. I only mean to convey the fact that Unreal doesn't break new ground as far as gameplay. It's a shooter. Period. If you imagine a scatter plot of all the games in the shooter tree, Unreal would sit squarely on the median line.

Still, Unreal manages to distinguish itself quite favorably. The weapons are, collectively, the most endearing I've seen. The alternate capabilities of each weapon add a pinch of strategy and a whole cup of fun to the combat. Detonating a plasma ball with the ASMD's primary fire is so much fun that I'll fabricate excuses to do it. But the only reason the weapons and combat are fun is because of the AI. The AI is exactly as I describe it in the scorecard: Distinguished. It won't earn a nobel prize, but the degree to which it is better than most shooters is high enough that you'll pine for it when you're playing most other shooters. In fact, just about the best word I can think of to describe the game as a whole is Distinguished. Unreal does what all the other 'traditional' shooters have done, and basically only what they've done, but does it better. The audio is appropriate at all times, and the music has a unique style that manages to impress without imposing. The interface is one of the most responsive and appropriate I've used (Heretic 2 beats it on terms of power, but not intuitiveness). The level designs are, for the most part, interesting, practical, and rewarding. Unfortunately, the 'antidote' for linearity that is employed is mostly the notion of pushing buttons so you can backtrack to a previously inaccessible area.

Ok, let's get this over with: the graphics. I feel like I'm caving in to peer pressure by giving the graphics a paragraph all its own. So yeah, they're great. I loitered around different scenic areas in the levels longer than in any game I can remember. I jokingly thought at times that the designers should have included a Polaroid as one of the items that you can acquire. I think the superiority in the graphics, however, boils down to the fact that the levels showcase wide open spaces with hugely scaled features, using really nice textures. The sense of scope and scale in the game is gawk-inspiring. The sky boxes are heavenly. I could send little Valentine's Day cards to the sky boxes. They're so dreamy!

Still, when the dust settled after playing both Unreal and the Mission Pack, I couldn't quite shake a lingering feeling of disappointment. Malaise, to be as precise as possible with a single word. But I quickly recognized that this feeling didn't stem from Unreal itself, but rather from the gameplay recipe. I.e. I wasn't disappointed in Unreal. I was disappointed in first person shooters. I realized that I have a fairly well-honed skill set that gets me through shooters without much difficulty, and that ultimately I'd just spent 20 hours shooting at predictable AI, pushing buttons, keeping an eye out for armor, and conserving the good ammo for the big monsters. I wasn't sure under what pretense I had done it, but at least I wasn't saving the Earth this time.

Lastly, here are a few unorganized things I wanted to say:

• What's with the batteries on the flashlight? I'm in a world with teleporters and spaceships, plasma rifles and heat-seeking rockets, but my flashlight doesn't last more than a few minutes. Game design tip: make the flashlight rechargable, just like the dispersion pistol. That way, I'm still prevented as a player from walking around with the flashlight on 24/7 (though, what do you care if I do?) but I don't have to worry about when I use the damn thing. Furthermore, your level designers don't have to worry about contriving ways to drop a flashlight every now and then. Just give a me flashlight, as in, it's one of the things I have, as opposed to one of the 'resources' I have to manage. The designers were smart enough to do the right thing in the Mission Pack, with the scuba gear and the flood light both being rechargable.

• Speaking of the dispersion pistol... Kudos! What a great way to design around the typical worthless-default-weapon syndrome. I got a *lot* of mileage out of this weapon, and was genuinely excited everytime I found an upgrade (hmm.. Heretic 2?).

• The end game in Unreal is just another in a long line of disappointing finishes to shooters. If nothing else, the level design and quality of graphics drops off sharply once you get on board the skaarj ship. More than that, though, the final encounter is a let down and ends up feeling more than a little nonsensical. Why am I bothering with this queen skaarj or whatever if I'm just trying to hijack an escape pod?  I guess I'm just supposed to shut up and shoot, right?

• The Mission Pack was simultaneously more entertaining and more disappointing than Unreal. The story progression, while pretty weak, was still significantly more tangible than Unreal, and the narration provided the motivation and sense of purpose that was missing in Unreal. The biggest disappointment in the Mission Pack, though, was the inexcusable disconnection between the story and the action. When you find out that you're expendible (no surprise there) you face a single squad of marines... and that's it! You don't see any more human forces for the remainder of the game. It's ridiculous and I don't understand it one bit. The marines were challenging, new, and fun to fight, and there was every reason to see more of them; and yet they are uniformly discarded as enemies after their cameo scene. This is confusing and disappointing.

• At one point, the narrator (your avatar) states, "I'm tired of doubling back so often... everytime I make some progress, it seems like I have to jump through hoops just to stay even." Apropos.

• At one point the game threatens to discard its sci-fi premise and take a DooM-esque evil/demonic/underworld turn. This just made me groan in disappointment. Luckily, it was a false alarm, as it only lasted a level or two, but that raised the natural question: what was the point? That kind of design inconsistency stood out like a real wart on what was a mostly unblemished game.

Is Unreal fun? As always, it depends on you. If you consistently have fun with shooters, real honest to God fun, then for the love of all things holy, go get Unreal Gold. It will give you what you want on a silver platter. With a chocolate mint. If, however, like me, you've had this nagging little doubt in the pit of your gaming gut that you've just been going through the motions when playing these gorgeous looking games, that you don't want to ask yourself if you're having fun because you don't want to know the answer; well then maybe you should take a step back and discriminate. It's ok, that's not a dirty word. You can skip the shooters and still be hardcore. Personally, I've got a select few shooters left on my playlist, and after I play them I'm going to take a hard look at whether or not I should just leave the genre on the shelf.

Marketing Lies

• "...fastest, sleekest, most dangerous 3D world ever created."

  
  Why do they even say stuff like that?

   

• "Discover the secret of this mysterious planet and find out what caused a peaceful race to be enslaved by vicious merciless aggressors"

  
  Secret? What secret? I don't remember discovering any secret? That statement makes Unreal's story sound a lot more substantial that it really is.

Tips

• You'll generally have plenty of ammo, but you'll make it a lot easier on yourself if you figure out what works best against the different enemies.  Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't.

• You can kill the titans with just the stinger. It takes about 160 rounds if I remember. It's a good choice for the titans because you'll likely not be using it on anything else, and will just be toting it around fully loaded most of the time.